The Wandering Ghost (george sueno and ernie bascom)

by Martin Limon

  Under normal MP procedure, a weapon is drawn only when you know that your life is in danger. These guys looked not as if they were worried about being hurt, but as if they’d already decided to go in firing.

  I ran after Ernie, trying to pull him away.

  Startled by our footsteps, Bufford and Weatherwax turned. They were about ten yards away. I grabbed Ernie’s shoulders and yanked him backwards. Just as I did so, a round was fired. I felt hot air pass above Ernie’s arm, and then we were both tumbling backward, somehow keeping our feet. Another round blasted into the night, but by now we’d slid into one of the narrow alleys running alongside of the Bunny Club. Ernie’d forgotten about kicking Bufford’s ass and he’d regained his balance-and regained his sobriety. The two of us were running shoulder to shoulder, bumping into one another, down the narrow alley. Ernie dodged to his left at the next alley, me with him, and as we did so another round blasted out, this one exploding into a brick wall behind us where we’d just been standing.

  Our feet turned into flying machines. Bufford and Weatherwax stayed close. I could hear the pounding of their boots and their occasional shouted commands to one another. Ernie and I twisted and turned and dodged and since Bufford and Weatherwax had to slow occasionally to see which way we had gone, we were starting to lengthen our lead.

  I wanted to keep running. Even though Ernie and I were both armed, I didn’t want to turn and fight. If, and when, Ernie and I returned to 8th Army headquarters in Seoul, we’d have enough explaining to do. I didn’t want to add two dead MPs to our list of indiscretions. Not if I could help it.

  There were no streetlights back here. When I looked back I could see the beam of an MP flashlight bouncing against brick.

  Ernie turned and turned again and then found a small inlet into which to dodge. We stopped, breathing heavily, listening to our pounding heartbeats. A streetlamp about twenty yards away cast a dim glow but we were hidden in shadow. Ernie pulled his. 45. If they closed in now, it would be an all out firefight. Their footsteps pounded a couple of alleys away. The steps retreated and then returned and then paced farther away in the opposite direction. Finally, after a long wait, all was quiet.

  Ernie whispered, “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere on the western edge of Bongil-chon, I think.”

  “Can we make it back to the jeep?”

  “They probably already have it spotted. Best if we catch a cab to take us to Seoul.”

  We still had about another hour until curfew. Enough time to take a kimchee cab to the northern edge of Seoul. Once there we could switch cabs and head back to 8th Army’s Yongsan compound on the southern edge of the capital city.

  “Okay. I’ll go first,” Ernie said.

  We started to return to the land of the living when suddenly, out of the shadows, something moved. At first I thought it was simply the play of light, but then I heard the tread of shoe leather on gravel. Before I could react, cold steel pressed into the hot flesh of my neck.

  “Freeze.”

  The voice was low, forceful. A woman’s voice. An American woman’s voice.

  Ernie raised his hands; I raised mine also. Then, I stepped away slowly and turned. She switched on a flashlight and aimed it at her highly polished jump boots. From its glow I saw the outlines of a shapely woman, a woman wearing a full uniform of pressed green fatigues, a web belt with a brightly polished brass buckle, and a black leather holster hanging at her hip. The rank insignia of corporal was pinned to her collar along with the crossed-pistols brass of the United States Army Military Police Corps. Even though the light was dim, her black helmet glistened and the big white letters MP shined like neon. But mostly I saw the unholy pit of the barrel of the. 45.

  “You’ve been following me,” the voice said from behind the pistol.

  I didn’t deny what she said. Neither did Ernie.

  “My name is Jill Matthewson.” the voice said again. “You will keep your hands in full view at all times.” She motioned with her. 45. “Do you understand?”

  Ernie and I both nodded. We understood.

  12

  J ill relieved Ernie of his. 45.

  She didn’t touch mine but told me to keep it holstered and continue to keep my hands in plain sight.

  “You have a vehicle,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go there.”

  Up on the ridge on Camp Howze, roving headlights indicated that emergency units were starting to roll. I could imagine the notification over the MP radio: Shots fired. Bongil-chon.

  We turned and walked, Jill Matthewson right behind us.

  After all this time, I couldn’t believe we’d found her. Or, more accurately, she’d found us. But how had she known we were looking for her? How had she found us in Bongil-chon? How had she known to be waiting in that alleyway at that particular time?

  These were all questions I wanted answered but all questions that would have to wait. In the distance, jeep engines roared. Probably more Camp Howze MPs pouring into the ville. I didn’t have a beef with the Camp Howze MPs but I knew that if they caught us we’d be transported back to Division headquarters at Camp Casey. That’s what I didn’t want. Warrant Officer Bufford and Staff Sergeant Weatherwax had already shown a willingness to shoot to kill. They were desperate now. They knew we were close to blowing apart their entire operation. Private Marvin Druwood and Mr. Pak Tong-i were already dead. I didn’t want Ernie and me added to the list.

  Dirty streetlamps illuminated our way. I glanced back as we walked. The. 45 in Jill Matthewson’s hand continued to be pointed at our backs. It never wavered.

  “How’d you find us?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I keep in contact with my friends.”

  “But the women at the Forest of Seven Clouds swore to us that they didn’t know where you were.”

  “They didn’t. I call them. Once or twice a day.”

  I filed that one away. I hadn’t asked the right questions. Maybe, if I’d received some inkling that Jill occasionally called the women at the Forest of Seven Clouds, I could’ve convinced Blue Orchid to relay a message.

  “But we stopped in Bongil-chon instead of driving straight to Seoul. How’d you know to look for us here?”

  She smiled. It was a great smile, wry and wise and full of laughter.

  “I hate to break it to you guys but you’re predictable. Anybody who knows you would know where you’d stop. The first GI bar district you came to.”

  “But you don’t know us,” I countered.

  She laughed. It was like a brass bell ringing. “I know you well enough.”

  Ernie straightened his jacket, uncomfortable at not having his. 45.

  “So you’ve been shadowing us,” Ernie said. “So you must’ve seen Bufford and Weatherwax. Are they alone or are there more MPs backing them up?”

  “Alone. Come on,” she said, motioning with Ernie’s. 45. “No more talk.”

  At the mouth of the alley, she motioned for us to wait and then stepped past us. She looked both ways and then entered the narrow pedestrian walkway. She trotted down the path, past brick-walled residences, until she reached a muddy thoroughfare. She waved for us to follow. When Ernie and I approached, she tossed Ernie’s. 45 back to him. He caught it in midair.

  “Be careful with that thing,” she told him. “Are you sober enough to drive?”

  “Always.”

  She turned and we followed her through the alleys until we reached neon. Ernie’s jeep sat thirty yards away. Still padlocked. Still untouched. Between us and the jeep, rows of bars were still open, rock and roll blaring out of open doors. Korean women stood in front. Business girls. Now, less than an hour until the midnight curfew, they could no longer wait demurely for some GI to wander into their club and sit down next to them and start spending money on them. They had to parade along the street and hustle. The few GIs who were still out were being accosted by the girls. Some of the GIs stopped and chatted. Some allowed themselves to be pulled into
a nightclub, maybe for a last drink, maybe to negotiate a night with a beauteous lady.

  At a distant intersection, a Camp Howze MP jeep roared past. We took that as our cue to emerge from the shadows and jog toward the parked jeep.

  The business girls backed up as we ran past. A few of them glanced at Ernie and me, but most of them kept their eyes riveted on Corporal Jill Matthewson. They’d seen uniformed MPs before, plenty of them, but they’d never seen one shaped like this. Jill seemed slighter than she had appeared in her official photo. Even beneath her bulky fatigues one could see that her waist was small and her ample bosom had to be firmly held in place. Most of the business girls would never have seen a female American soldier before because the few American women assigned to Division were all stationed at the headquarters at Camp Casey.

  As soon as the Korean business girls realized what they were seeing, a murmur arose amongst them. They elbowed one another, pointed, and stared in awe as Jill Matthewson waded through them. Jill didn’t acknowledge their attention. Her focus was on the jeep. But it was clear to me that these young, put-upon, Korean business girls, had just seen something akin to a miracle. A woman in a position of power. A woman leading men. A woman wearing a pistol and a uniform, set on her own self-determined goal, not letting anything stand in her way.

  Ernie noticed the reaction and said to a couple of the business girls, “Hey, what about me?”

  They ignored him.

  As we climbed in the jeep, I folded myself into the tattered back seat; Jill sat up front next to Ernie. The business girls approached the jeep, as if mesmerized. Still, Jill Matthewson acted as if she hadn’t noticed their reaction.

  For a moment, sitting in the back seat, I thought of pulling my. 45, disarming Corporal Jill Matthewson, and placing her under arrest. But then what would I do? Take her back to Seoul? Charge her with being AWOL? Eventually, I’d be forced to turn her over to the Division provost marshal. No way. First, I was going to encourage her cooperation and hear what she had to say. Then we’d make a decision as to what our next move would be.

  Ernie started the jeep, jammed it into gear. He rolled forward slowly because of the awestruck business girls surrounding us. Finally, when he was clear of them, he gunned the engine to the next intersection and started to turn right, toward the main paved street that led to Reunification Road.

  “Not right,” Jill told him. “Left. Back to the Bunny Club.”

  “Why?” Ernie asked.

  “You’ll see. Just do as I tell you.”

  Ernie shrugged and turned the wheel to the left. As we approached the Bunny Club, the glow from the neon out front illuminated the jeep that Bufford and Weatherwax had driven up in. Still sitting there, untouched.

  “Pull over!” Jill shouted.

  Ernie did. Before the jeep had come to a full stop, she leaped out, running, and for a moment I thought she was escaping. She ran toward the front of the Bunny Club. The designation stenciled in white lettering on the jeep’s bumper said: HQ CO, 2ND ID PMO. Translation: Headquarters Company of the 2nd Infantry Division Provost Marshal’s Office. I pulled my. 45, fearing that Bufford and Weatherwax might appear at any moment.

  Jill Matthewson approached the jeep, drew her. 45, and took aim. She fired six rounds; two into the radiator, one each into the four tires. Satisfied, she reholstered her pistol, trotted back, and jumped into the passenger seat next to Ernie.

  “We ain’t left yet?” she asked.

  Ernie stared at her for a moment, immobile. Then he seemed to come to his senses, nodded grimly, let out the clutch, and jammed the little jeep into gear. We lurched forward. He gunned the engine, twisted the steering wheel, and after a few hairpin turns, the three of us sped off toward Reunification Road.

  When we told her that Private Marvin Druwood was dead, Jill Matthewson slammed her fist into the wall of the hooch. The entire building shook.

  “Damn!” she shouted.

  She wouldn’t look at us. She stared at the floor, shaking her head, and then she gazed out the open sliding double doors of the little hooch.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she said. “Private Marvin Druwood, United States Army Military Police Corps. Innocent little Marv Druwood.”

  I thought of asking something like, You knew him well? But every sentence I composed mentally sounded lame, so I kept my mouth shut.

  After leaving Bongil-chon, Jill had instructed Ernie to turn north on Reunification Road, guiding us farther away from Seoul. A mile later, she had us turn left onto a two-lane highway running east. For twenty minutes, we drove through rice paddies and wooded hills barely illuminated by a rising moon. Finally, we reached the town of Wondang. There were no U.S. military compounds anywhere near here and, as far as I could tell, no ROK Army compounds either.

  We’d parked the jeep near the city center in front of a Buddhist temple. According to Jill, the temple held an ancient bronze bell that was sounded by bald monks every morning at dawn. Two blocks farther on, we reached a walled compound into which were crammed about a dozen hooches, including Jill’s.

  Inside the hooch, we sat on an ondol floor. It was a comfortable little hooch, old but well maintained; Jill Matthewson seemed to have mastered all the intricacies of Korean housekeeping. As soon as we arrived, she’d unlaced her combat boots and slipped on a pair of rubber sandals. She used metal tongs to reach into a subterranean stone furnace at the base of the outer wall of the hooch. She pulled out one flaming charcoal briquette and replaced it with a new one. Next, she carried the spent briquette over to a cement storage space tucked away from the other hooches so as to prevent fire.

  Then she observed as Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the wooden porch. After we had entered the hooch, she used a moist rag to wipe down the porch’s immaculate varnished surface. In the cement-floored kitchen-adjacent to the one-room living space- she had used a wooden match to light a single butane burner. Then she’d gone outside to fill a brass teapot with water from an outdoor spigot. Fifteen minutes later she’d unfolded the legs of a one-foot-high, mother-of-pearl serving table and Ernie and I were sipping Folgers instant coffee ladled from a short bottle with a Korean customs duty stamp emblazoned on it. We sat on flat, square cushions covered with silk.

  “Where’s Kim Yong-ai?” I asked, once Jill had settled down.

  “At work,” Jill replied.

  “Where does she work?”

  Jill eyed me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

  I raised two open palms in mock surrender. “Just curious.”

  “I know you’re curious,” she replied. “That’s why you spent so much time looking for me. You want to find out what’s really going on in Division.”

  I did. But first I thought I’d show her something. I pulled out the photocopy of the letter that her mother had sent to her congressman. I handed it to her. While Jill read, Ernie stirred more sugar into his coffee, content for the moment to let me handle the interview. Anything touchy-feely, Ernie held no truck with.

  Jill read the letter, then read it again. She began to cry. Angry at herself, she wiped the tears from her eyes.

  “It’s understandable why you didn’t write your mom. Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said.

  “It’s not that,” Jill replied. “It’s just that she pulled it off so well.”

  “ ‘Pulled it off’?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Mom’s not real good at writing letters. But I called her from a pay telephone on Camp Casey. Told her what I was planning to do.”

  Now it was Ernie’s turn to be amazed. “You told your mom that you were planning to go AWOL?”

  “Right,” Jill said calmly, stirring more sugar into her coffee. “And I told her why.”

  Ernie and I glanced at one another. Waiting. Both of us afraid to interrupt Jill Matthewson.

  “I told my mom to write the letter to her congressman,” Jill said. “And I told her what to say, and I told her when to send the letter.”


  “Why?” I ventured to ask.

  Jill stopped stirring her coffee and stared at each of us in turn.

  “To get you guys up here,” she said. “I need help. From Eighth Army or the Marines or the FBI or somebody.” She waved her arms in a broad circle. “I can’t do all this on my own. And somebody has to put a stop to what’s happening in Division.”

  Neither Ernie nor I responded. Maybe we were both too dumbfounded by this turn of events. Or maybe it was because once a principal in an investigation starts answering questions you didn’t ask, the best thing to do is keep your trap shut. Jill examined the cover letter from the office of the congressman from the district that encompasses Terre Haute, Indiana. She snorted a laugh.

  “Finally, somebody up top is interested in what goes on in Division.”

  “What do you mean ‘finally’?” I asked.

  “‘Finally,’ because first I went to the IG.” The Inspector General.

  “The Division IG?”

  “Yes. I told him about the black marketing, the whole thing, from A to Z. Then he called the provost marshal.”

  “They called the very guy you were complaining about?”

  “Right. Told him I needed some ‘extra training’ as they put it.”

  “What about the IG report?”

  “There was no report. Not that I ever saw anyway.”

  Any 2nd Division IG report would’ve made its way to 8th Army. Ernie and I’d checked before we left Seoul. No reports concerning Jill Matthewson existed. In addition, a copy of any IG complaint should’ve been attached to the Division serious incident report. It wasn’t.

  “So they buried your complaint?” Ernie asked.

  “What else?” Jill replied. “The Division IG is one of the colonels who attends their mafia meetings.”

  The inspector general is, theoretically, an independent ombudsman who examines all aspects of the operational capability of military units. This includes reports of wrongdoing that can’t be handled through the normal chain of command. This independence is theoretical. In fact, he lives cheek by jowl with the rest of the officer corps and you can bet the Division commander watches his every move. It takes a lot of nerve to be a truly independent IG. Most of them don’t have enough of what it takes.